16th December 2009 Archive

Google - the world's largest online ad broker - sees no reason to worry about the addition of ad-blocking extensions to its Chrome browser. Online advertisers will ensure their ads aren't too annoying, the company says, and netizens will ultimately realize that online advertising is a good thing.

Server virtualization and the live migration of virtual machines across a network of servers and storage has allowed companies like VMware and Citrix Systems to bully their way into the high availability server market. And Stratus Technologies, which makes mirrored, fault-tolerant x64 boxes, is fighting back against what it sees as less resilient server setups with a deal for customers who buy its top-end ftServer 6300. The deal is simple: If they buy specific ftServer setups and the machines have unplanned downtime, they get $50,000 in cash.

Over the last 12 months Acer has been spitting out smartphones like there is no tomorrow. Some of them, like the Tempo F900, have been quite good while others, like the beTouch E101, have been, ahem, less impressive. Yet none have really scored as a hit in our book, but that may be about to change with the release of the A1 Liquid, Acer's first Android phone.

Citrix has delivered a key feature of the Essentials stack of management tools for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor for Windows platforms and pledged to bring the high availability tool, called StorageLink Site Recovery, to its own XenServer hypervisor next year.

We're delighted to announce today that our Paper Aircraft Released Into Space (PARIS) programme has attracted sponsorship from Peer 1 - the international hosting firm which has demonstrated it has the Right Stuff by backing our audacious upper-atmosphere plane plan.

The US military has decided to spend $1.4m developing a robotic arm which will be mounted on the deck of a warship in order to pluck robot aeroplanes out of the sky, so permitting them to land safely on vessels without large flight decks.

Already shouldering the unfortunate burden of cheerleading for the ID cards scheme, one might expect the universe might cut Home Office minister Meg Hillier some slack. Alas, at an event in Liverpool to promote said white elephant yesterday, she forgot her ID card.

Internet-only publications are to face the same regulations as newspapers for the first time under an extension to the powers of newspaper industry self-regulator body the Press Complaints Commission (PCC).

It’s time to wrap up with the fourth and final part of our trilogy in true geek style. In addition to the books featured below, we also have a further 12,000+ items available at the bookstore, all with special Chrimbo discounts and same working day dispatch where available. There is also free delivery on orders over £25!

It doesn't happen often, but just for once there's good news out of the Ministry of Defence - good news for British troops in combat overseas, and good news for British taxpayers too. But it's bad news for the UK arms biz, and bad news for certain regional communities who rely on the MoD to bring them government money they wouldn't otherwise receive - and don't particularly deserve.

Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing subsidiary of online retailer Amazon, today has put a media serving and caching front end on its Simple Storage Service (S3) storage cloud that lets it act as a distributed (as in globally) media server to feed streaming content on the cheap.

Sad news for fans of the exciting new sport of ultra-violent hadron billiards today, as international science alliance CERN shuts down the Large Hadron Collider - most powerful particle-punisher ever built - for the Christmas break this evening.

In a bid to distract hacks from Intel's upcoming battle with the Federal Trade Commission, the chip giant's spin team have come up with a "funny" video of five Finnish employees firing themselves from cannons in a bid to play the Intel five-note jingle.

IBM has acquired privately held business process management software niche player Lombardi, an outfit based in Austin, Texas. IBM says that its middleware stack needed some BPM tools that allowed for people and the departments they work in to be wrapped in the loving embrace of workflow software like ERP and content management systems are using other BPM tools.

The international hacker who has admitted to stealing more than 130 million payment card numbers has mounted a new defense claim that he might suffer from Asperger's syndrome, a court filing indicates.

In an effort to get Wall Street excited about the company again, Dell has committed to extract $4bn in costs from its operations between 2009 and 2011. That gets a bit tricky if Dell keeps acquiring companies, and it had to keep acquiring if it's gonna dig itself out of it commodity hardware corner, a place where a slick and fast supply chain and direct sales to the customer aren't enough to generate profits.